Variety SF Feed (What is this?)
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Found a broken link? May be the story can still be found.
Background, & a previous follow up post.
Looks like these stories are now gone from these alternate locations too - so a lot of external links at Variety SF (& elsewhere on the net) are broken.
A species of animals, physically alien but with sexual & reproductive behavior similar to many familiar animals. "Plan" in the title is a substitute for "instinct"; story is of an individual's futile fight against the instinct.
Background.
While Sci Fiction archives are no longer available at scifi.com, & Wayback Machine of Internet Archive has but an incomplete version of the archives, these archives appear to have began surfacing at multiple places on the web, including the stories missing at Internet Archive. Two sites I noticed today: Link1, Link2.
So the lesson is: next time you find a Sci Fiction story missing from a known site, just search for it with Google. Odds are - more sites containing the old archives might have come live.
Among the stories these new sites have brought back online is the fantastic "Allamagoosa" (download) by Eric Frank Russell.
Background.
I've fixed it at most obvious places; if you still see some of these links broken, let me know. Thank you.
Thanks to John @ SF Signal, I learned yesterday that Sci Fiction story links to scifi.com now redirect to new syfy.com & the new site no longer has Sci Fiction archives. Means a lot of broken links at Variety SF (& all over web).
This seems to have happened sometime during the last fortnight; it was ok when I last posted a Sci Fiction story not too long back.
Most, but not all, of the original Sci Fiction archives can now be found at Wayback Machine of Internet Archive. I will eventually fix Variety SF's broken links, but this will take a while. In the meantime, please remember to use the alternate good location.
Stylistically similar to joint works Henry Kuttner & C L Moore, except for ending. That itself is reason enough for me to look for more Tenn; that I've'nt seen anything bad from him yet is more motivation.
Concept is based on the German legend of "Faust" (a man makes a deal with the devil); more on it later in this post. Devil here is a vastly smarter alien; but by the end of the story, both man & alien will be licked.
In spite of the subject, it's a very light read - sometimes even funny.
This is a much darker story than I normally post.
Only 3 weeks ago, I would have rated it C & never bothered to write this post. I'm sure I'm reading more into it than author intended, but the "beast" in this story thinks too much like the terrorists involved in Bombay attacks a fortnight back; at least two of them who talked to a news channel using victim's phone during the (I think first day of the) siege.
PS: This video recording (I cannot see the video on my PC, but looks like others are able to see) is of the first of the two calls (in Hindi) that were aired by India TV; I could not locate the second one online. This was the call that convinced me we were dealing with Pakistanis - the man claims he is from Hyderabad in the South, but language, accent, & the words used are instant give away. And the content of the talk felt so much like the "beast" in this story (second call also felt like this "beast" - to my biased mind, at least).
Chandler summarizes colonization pattern of that era in a template: "the chance contact, the trader, the missionary, the incident, and the gunboat", ... Only, in this story, the natives are earthmen, & colonists are aliens. Very well told story, though the later parts are a bit rushed.
Note the aliens in this story don't quite look alien. In fact, they are very human - even on first contact, they are able to eat our food & vice-versa, not to speak of other similarities like physical appearance. Point of this story is the dramatization of the colonization pattern.
I doubt it's intended that way, but it felt like the story of the third sex - neither male nor female, yet both - still shunned in many societies, or at least looked upon condescendingly. There have sometimes been demands in India to make the government forms give a choice other than male/female in sex column.
At a certain level, this is a highly fantasized version of it. As also of society's tendency to reward the normal, & often discourage the deviation from normal - even when the deviation ought to a desirable one.
Story sometimes uses "Gy", other times "Gyr", to refer to the world where the story is set. It uses the term "plane" where "planetary" might have been meant (but author tells us it's intentional - in this interview). "Man" & "woman" are used for bird-beings of this world who are otherwise very different from human beings; I recall an instance of "human beings" used to refer to them.
In answer to one of the questions in this interview (about 75% of the way through), author tells us this story is going to be part of a series; she also provides some contextual information on this story.
During 2000-2005, now defunct Sci Fiction reprinted a total of 103 short fiction classics; I suppose we can read the list as "Ellen Datlow's Selected SF Classics" - which sort of gives it a certain credibility. And they are all online. It's convenient to look at this bunch as a huge anthology; so I decided to have a look.
Update 25 July 2009: Sometime during July 2009, scifi.com started redirecting traffic to renamed syfy.com which no longer has Sci Fiction archives. Most, but not all, their stories are still available at Wayback Machine of Internet Archive. I've changed the story links below to reflect this.
Because of the large number of stories, this post is going to take a long time filling up. I've read only a few stories from the list, & in fact had not even heard the names of a lot of authors on this list.
In spite of the name Sci Fiction, they used to publish fantasy & non-genre stories too; & that is reflected in included stories.
For read stories, my rating is in brackets. Link on story title takes you to my notes on the story. Full text of the story is accessible via download link. I also note the first published data, where I'm aware of it.
Note: List below is produced by looking up their archive page, & counts 103 entries. I had taken their site dump when they stopped publishing, & corresponding folder on my hard disk has 111 entries! Will reconcile the difference later.
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